Opinion: Rudy Giuliani, please shut up

It’s hard to get on big network TV without seeing Rudy Giuliani’s aging face plastered all over the television, and when that’s the case, the expectation is often to cringe at whatever he’s about to say next.

The most boneheaded thing that Giuliani has done as of late is claim that President Obama must not love America and its citizens because of the way he has handled terrorism and foreign policy. Now be mindful of the fact that Giuliani, as much as any (now former) mayor in the United States’ history, has been romanticized as someone with constructive things to say on terrorism, given his unifying responses to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Because of this, he has been considered a legitimate advocate on foreign policy and a GOP darling (though a moderate) since the time of the attacks in New York City.

It’s not hard to be fairly critical of Obama and the U.S.’s foreign policy agenda at times and in more ways than one, but it sure seems that Giuliani has fallen into the cracks and has succumbed to “batty old uber-conservative syndrome” or some strain of that dire affliction.

At a private dinner for Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Giuliani took to a podium and made remarks about the Grand Old Party’s favorite all-time punching bag.

“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said that night. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

No one should care about whether Giuliani thinks Obama loves this country or not. That should not be my or anyone else’s concern. Really, what Giuliani has done here is promote a tireless rhetoric that advances nothing for anyone, the GOP included. In fact politicians like Indiana Gov. Mike Pence and former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, have already moved to distance themselves from his remarks.

But it’s not the first time in the last several months that Giuliani has veered from “wise sage” to “cranky grandpa” mode.

In the wake of the lack of an indictment for Darren Wilson following the killing of Mike Brown, and responses to critiques of policing in NYC during his tenure as mayor, Giuliani has come off oblivious and out-of-touch. He has appeared on NBC and Fox notably, as well as a string of other big-time appearances on panels and as a guest to anchors/hosts, but it was his appearance discussing race with NBC’s Michael Eric Dyson that he stated about Ferguson, Wilson and Brown, “I find it very disappointing that you’re not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America are killed by other blacks. We’re talking about the exception here.”

And as Fred Clark noted on Patheos, (a Progressive Christian news source), Giuliani stated later in that same discussion, “It is the reason for the heavy police presence in the black community,” he said. “White police officers won’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70 percent of the time.” According to Clark, “Giuliani argued that white police officers are only present in certain communities because black people are committing crimes.”

“Giuliani went so far as to rebuke the President for not being ‘brought up the way you were and the way I was brought up through love of this country,’ a bow no doubt to the parenting prowess of Harold Giuliani, who did time in Sing Sing for holding up a Harlem milkman and was the bat-wielding enforcer for the loan-sharking operation run out of a Brooklyn bar owned by Rudy’s uncle.”

The thing is, the media isn’t spending time ridiculing Giuliani’s upbringing under the guise of thinly-veiled racism. Instead, he’s credited with making something for himself, even though as Barrett pointed out in his article, there is plenty of reason to discredit Giuliani’s testimony to morality and respectable politics.

All in all, who cares about Giuliani’s opinion? The concern is that American society and the media think that Giuliani should have a major stake in contributing to conversations about foreign policy, racism and policing. So please, can we stop giving attention to old politicians without anything constructive to say about policy, and instead, leave them to wither away without relevancy like Giuliani should be doing?

Kaleb is currently the director of research and development and maintains a blog on Law, Justice, and the Media. He was previously social media director and a city reporter, and has worked as a journalist in some capacity at WOUB, Hustlebelt, and Mid-Major Madness covering sports, and additionally was an editorial and writing intern with The Athens News. This past summer he served as a communications intern for the ACLU of Ohio. He likes to write about civil liberties, human rights, social justice work, contemporary American politics, the law and more. You can find him coaching high school football, watching Spongebob, Dragon Ball Z, and surfing tumblr.

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